Court dismisses lawsuit to halt particle collider tests
Judge says U.S. has no jurisdiction over European Large Hadron Collider
Sharon Gaudin

October 1, 2008 (Computerworld) A U.S. federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit seeking to halt experiments in the world's largest particle collider.

Chief Judge Helen Gillmor made her ruling late last week in U.S. District Court in Honolulu. The civil suit called for more safety reviews to be done before any experiments could be conducted at the collider.

The Large Hadron Collider, which sits on the Franco-Swiss border, ran its first test last month when it sent two particle beams -- one at a time -- around the 17-mile, vacuum-sealed underground tube. As that first test neared, however, criticism about the collider and the experiments being done there escalated. Many critics cited reports circulating around the Internet that the experiments might destroy the universe by accidentally creating a black hole that would suck everything and everyone into it.

Walter Wagner, a retired nuclear safety officer, and Luis Sancho, a Spanish science writer, had raised those concerns in their lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the Large Hadron Collider.

Gillmor wrote in her decision that the U.S. federal courts do not have jurisdiction over the European-based collider, even though the project received $531 million in U.S. funding. Gillmor concluded that the U.S. contribution was not a "major federal action" because it accounted for less than 10% of the cost to construct the collider. The judge also noted that a 1997 agreement between the U.S. and CERN gave the U.S. a "nonvoting observer" status, and no role in financial, policy, management or operational decisions.

Under the Big Bang theory, many scientists believe that more than 13 billion years ago, an amazingly dense object the size of a coin expanded into the universe that we know now -- with planets, stars, black holes and life. Some people fear that by smashing the particle beams together in the collider, a similar cataclysmic reaction might occur, vaporizing our planet or sucking it into a black hole that would shoot it out into an alternate universe.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs alleged that a runaway fusion reaction could destroy Earth, or that the collider could create a "micro black hole" that would swallow the planet.

CERN released a report last month contending that such safety fears are "unfounded." CERN Director General Robert Aymar was quoted as saying that any suggestion that there's a risk is "pure fiction."

Fears about the experiments reached such a furor that Frank Wilczek, an MIT physics professor and Nobel laureate, received death threats because of his involvement with the Large Hadron Collider.

Wilczek sat on the Hadron Collider science advisory committee for six years. He more recently took the government's side in this U.S.-based lawsuit.

While the lawsuit has been dismissed, the collider still won't be running any more experiments for the next several months.

Last week, CERN announced that an apparent melted electrical connection between two magnets has brought the Large Hadron Collider down until spring. Technicians there reportedly need to investigate the issue further and do repairs. And those repairs are unlikely to be completed before the project enters its "winter maintenance" period.

Many critics cited reports circulating around the Internet that the experiments might destroy the universe by accidentally creating a black hole that would suck everything and everyone into it.

Then they'd better get the Hard On machine fixed up quick smart, before everything and everyone gets sucked into the black hole caused by the sub-prime debacle.

Adrian Wainer

10-04-2008, 06:05 AM

This is the baby that is worrying me!

New Internet broadband wireless technology generates hope, fear

Hutchinson Whampoa's enormous $4.3-billion network accelerator or atpx 45/9697uv fast pipe splitter service, to be activated as early as October 2008, is generating both excitement and fear.

By Thomas Handley Jefferson
July 15, 2008

Professor Frank Sinci, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the Bjorn-Hutchinson nano-quark in 2001, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won’t destroy the world.

“If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away,” the physicist said in an interview at the Hutchinson Whampoa institute for Advanced Networks, known by its French acronym, CUBOKER “But some are real physicists.”

What the critics are in such a lather about is the $2.1-billion Large Maugrhey Collider, a massive assemblage of iron, steel and superconducting wire 300 feet underground in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel outside Bombay, India.

The most complex piece of scientific equipment ever built, the collider will send particles crashing into each other at just a wink shy of the speed of light, generating energies more powerful than the sun.

Scientists like Sinci are confident that the Large Maughrey Collider, when it begins operating as early as October 2008, will enable Three, Hutchinson Whampoa's commercial arm to offer 7.2 Gigabyte download speeds via wireless internet.

Critics think the collider or atpx 45/9697uv fast pipe splitter as it is refered to by the Hutchinson Whampoa could also spawn a black hole that will swallow Earth.

That could be just an appetizer. Once the collider got going, according to the doomsday scenario, it could gobble up distant stars like a child popping Skittles.

Professor Frank Sinci, who is part of the CUBOKER group studying the safety of the collider, doesn’t deny the scant possibility that the collider could yield a mini-black hole.

By smashing Bjorn-Hutchinson quarks and Helium atoms together at energies reaching 145 trillion electron volts, the Large Maughrey Collider will dwarf the world’s other atom smashers, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s mighty Tevatron in Batavia, Ill.

But that energy, Professor Sinci hastened to add, would be concentrated in a space thinner than a human hair. Any black hole would be so tiny that it wouldn’t be able to get its teeth around a bit of local chevre cheese, let alone the world.

Still, if a black hole was produced at all, “that would be an extremely spectacular result,” he said, a half-smile creeping across his face.

Particle physics

Deep in a dim cavern, Professor Anthony Wu, Winner of the Nobel Prize for research in to Gravity Field induction scrambled onto a catwalk straddling the six-story gravity diffuser known as the Reverse Phase Quantum Oscilator, then darted up two flights of stairs to another catwalk, where the guts of the machine materialized out of the half-light.

It looked a little like the inside of a computer suffering from a severe case of gigantism. Plates, shields and pipes jutted everywhere. Thick knots of cable extended from the side like mounds of heavy rope on an 18th century whaling ship.

“This detector was assembled at the surface and lowered in 15 pieces,” Professor Wu said, pointing to a wide opening above the detector that reached to the Indian sky high above.

The heaviest piece weighed 4 million pounds. It took 10 hours to lower the middle section. At the center of this section is a bulbous extension that makes the behemoth look like the world’s biggest television picture tube. This single piece of the collider contains more iron than the Eiffel Tower.

It was all built to force gravity to transmit data signals

The answers to present difficulties in provideing ultra high speed internet download Hutchinson Whampoa's scientists believe, lie in reactions with the extreme energies that occurred during the first moments after the Big Bang. To reach those energies, they have to push particles as close to the speed of light as possible.

The Maughrey collider uses a powerful electromagnetic field to accelerate particles. “Think of a swing,” said Dr Carlos Miguel Ferranti, a fast-talking Spanish physicist, as he strode through a section of the long collider tunnel. “Each time the beam comes around, the field pushes it a little faster.”

At the peak, the hydrogen protons in the new collider will reach 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Each packet of protons will complete 11,245 laps around the collider every second and carry as much power as a speeding train.

The collider will consume as much energy as all the households in Bombay, running up an annual electric bill of $15.2 million.

To guide the proton beams through the twin tubes of the collider, 9,600 magnets will continually tune the positively charged protons as they speed around the collider. The superconducting magnets are cooled with liquid helium to minus 456.25 degrees, a whisker above absolute zero.

Whatever objects spring into being in the collider won’t last long. They will be relatively big and thus inherently unstable and will quickly decay into more-familiar particles.

Some of these weird objects may travel as much as a millimeter or two before decaying, while others will travel less than the diameter of a proton before vanishing in a shower of quarks, gluons, electrons or neutrinos.

Because the detectors will produce millions of collisions every second, scientists will rely on huge clusters of computers to analyze the results. The computers will discard all the collisions, preserving only the gravity data carrier wave.

Physicists aren’t working completely in the dark. Extra dimensions, for example, could show themselves by the unusual paths the decaying particles take as they shoot off into the various layers of the detectors.

If all goes as planned, Hutchinson Whampoa scientists say, the atpx 45/9697uv fast pipe splitter is likely to become one of the greatest engines of development in history, far outstripping the introduction of the Gutenburg printing press and even Marconi's development of Radio transmission.

“This is the elevator that will take us to the next floor of the global village”, Sinci said.

The former Soviet secretive P4 Clem institute in Siberia spent years trying to develop this technology, many believe that the tens of billions of dollars the USSR spent on this technology without produceing a working machine eventually bankrupted the Soviet union and therby caused its collapse . The Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN saw tantalizing hints of the Gravity data wave carrier before it was shut down in 2000 for construction of a new collider.

Many Physicists are confident about the gravity data carrier wave concept but think that it is just too fragile to be produced and stabilized in even a machine as costly and sophiscated as the Maughrey Collider

But how could a collision of tiny particles like Bjorn-Hutchinson Quarks and Helium Atoms produce a gravity data transmission wave

In our macro-world, crashing things together, like cars, makes big things into smaller things, like broken headlights and fenders. But it’s different in the subatomic world, where crashing two Priuses together can produce a 10-wheeler.

“Remember,” Dr Ferranti says “according to Einstein, mass is congealed energy.” In other words, if you create enough energy in one place, it can remake itself into a chunk of mass.

Ferranti compared the particles that have been created in other colliders to rubber ducks. “We’ve made millions of duckies,” Dr Ferranti says with a big grin, “Now we want to make an elephant.”

Because the new Maughrey collider will be seven times as powerful as the Tevatron, if the Gravity Carrier Wave can be stabilized, the Haughey collider should be the machine to do it.

“If we don’t stabilize the Gravity data Carrier Wave, the engineers have a lot of explaining to do,” said University of Geneva postdoctoral student Charles du Prey over lunch in the CUBOKER cafeteria, where one can hear conversations in a dozen languages.

The huge burst of energy in particle collisions becomes a kind of time machine, transporting scientists back to the first microseconds after the Big Bang.

The universe was only about 200 million miles wide, consisting of a viscous cloud of quarks and gluons floating in a searing plasma. As the universe expanded and cooled, the quarks combined to make protons and neutrons. The gluons held them together to form the nuclei of atoms.

To re-create this plasma, one of the collider’s detectors, known as ALICE, will accelerate heavy lead ions. One of the heaviest of all elements, each lead atom contains 82 protons and 125 neutrons.

By pounding these sacks of protons and neutrons together, the scientists hope to free the quarks and gluons from their embrace into a free-floating quark-gluon plasma.

With this recreation of the early moments of the universe, scientists may also be able to delve into the unexplained imbalance between matter and antimatter.

So far, experiments have not been able to explain why there’s so much matter in the universe and no antimatter, beyond what is created in colliders.

According to experiments, there should be 1020 (100 billion billion) more photons of light than protons of matter in the universe. In fact, Nakada said, the number is closer to 1010. That’s a huge amount of unexplained matter in the form of galaxies, stars, planets and theoretical physicists.

A detector called the LHCb will try to unravel this mystery by making very precise measurements of a certain kind of quark that is created in particle collisions, the b meson, and its opposite, the anti-b meson.

Adrian Wainer

10-04-2008, 06:09 AM

Black holes

Then there’s the matter of black holes.

Marvin Oldman, a Stanford physicist who was one of the discoverers of the Whags-46 particle and is leader of the U.S. contingent on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, said the collider could theoretically produce a mini-black hole by packing a tremendous amount of energy into a tiny space.

But he said the black hole would pose no threat because it would last only 10-27 seconds before decaying – hardly enough time to start gobbling up the Indian countryside.

Critics are not convinced. Just last month, Richard M Straus and John Ferrero filed suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to block the start-up of the new collider until CUBOKER produces a comprehensive safety report.

Speaking from Los Angeles, Ferrero said that despite assurances from scientists at CUBOKER and around the world, there was no proof a mini-black hole would disappear. No one has ever seen it happen, said Ferrero, who studied gravity physics at UC Berkeley as a young man.

It’s just as possible that the tiny black hole would be stable and start chewing up normal matter, he said.

It could take years for it to become large enough to gobble up the Earth, but there’s no evidence that can’t happen, he said.

His suit for a restraining order is to “preserve the status quo while the court considers the arguments. In this case, the status quo is Mother Earth being here,” he said.

Another nightmare possibility is that the collider could produce something called strange matter, a theoretical substance that some physicists think exists in the center of the remnants of collapsed stars.

The pressure and temperature are so intense that the protons and electrons fuse into neutrons, then collapse into a mass of quarks.

Theoretically, the tremendous gravity of strange matter would convert any ordinary matter it came in contact with.

Sinci has said he is now writing a report addressing such concerns. He said that protests of physics experiments were nothing new.

“Before each new accelerator started, there has been some panic,” he said. Fererro, in fact, filed suit in 1999 to stop Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York. It went ahead and the world survived – just as it will this time, according to scientists from Mangano to Oldman and Stephen Hawking.

“Look,” Sinci says, leaning forward in his chair at CUBOKER's sprawling complex, “what if I told you tomorrow when you shave you will blow up the world? You laugh. You say that can’t happen. But how do you know?

“The only thing we know is that there have been about a million billion shaves since people started shaving and the world is still here,” he said. “So all we can say is the probability of you blowing up the world when you shave tomorrow is less than one in 1015.”

PS If you want to read a nice bit of science journalism which inspired the above go to

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr...sci-collider13

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

Walther

10-04-2008, 08:23 AM

The funny thing is that more powerfull particle reactions happen all the time when our upper atmosphere reacts with cosmic radiation. The collider enables the scientists to study such reactions for the first time under laboratory conditions.
IMO, most of the critics are scientists from other fields of science, who would like to stop funding for experimental particle physics to get the money into their own pet projects.

Similar wars happen between proponents of manned and unmanned spaceflight.